Why Remembering What You Read Isn’t That Important

I was chat­ting with a col­league of mine the other day. He asked me, “Do you think we retain more when we hear a book, than when we read it? If so, why do you think that is?” Both of us are audio­book affi­ciona­dos, so we do a lot of lis­ten­ing to books.

His ques­tion got me think­ing. Is retain­ing infor­ma­tion really the goal of reading?

I don’t think so. I think the most impor­tant net effect from read­ing a book is how it changes us, not the stuff we can recall.

That sounds pretty neb­u­lous, so let me pro­vide three examples:

• When I read the Bible (which is vastly dif­fer­ent from any other book), my goal isn’t to remem­ber all the facts, but rather to see God, and to allow him to change me through what I read. Sure, I’d love to ace every game of “Bible Trivia,” but that’s not the point of read­ing the Bible. Remem­ber­ing facts is inci­den­tal to the deeper work of a changed life.
• I read a book called Atlas Shrugged. Recently, I was try­ing to remem­ber the name of the pro­tag­o­nist, and it took me a while. (I finally came up with it:  Daphne Tag­gart.) I may not remem­ber all the facts from the book, but I know that the book plunged me into a deep think­ing expe­ri­ence about objec­tivism, pol­i­tics — stuff like that.
• Some of the books I read have a lot of facts, fig­ures, dates, names, and details. I don’t remem­ber them. But I remem­ber how the book impacted me. For exam­ple, I read Blink by Pink (sounds strange, I know). I for­get a bunch of the con­tent, but I know that the book helped launch me into an exer­cis­ing rou­tine that changed my life. I read When the Rivers Run Dry, and can­not tell you how a dew pond is formed. But I sure can tell you how I was impacted by a stag­ger­ing real­iza­tion water’s importance.

So, remem­ber­ing what we read isn’t as impor­tant as being changed by what we read. There is a dif­fer­ence, but it’s subtle.

The sub­tlety leads me to offer a dis­claimer. Part of being changed by what we read is remem­ber­ing what we read. Being changed means recall­ing the con­tent of a book to some degree. That’s why mem­o­riz­ing Scrip­ture is impor­tant. That’s why I’d like to re-read some books I own. I want the actual con­tent — facts, state­ments, and infor­ma­tion — to stick. More impor­tantly, I want to go through the infor­ma­tion again to become fur­ther changed by its value, not just its facts.

Books change us, but that is not pri­mar­ily a change in the amount of men­tal stuff we retain. It has to do more with the way we change as a per­son. Here are my take­aways from this thought.

• It’s impor­tant to be inten­tional about what I read.
• It’s impor­tant to be care­ful how I read.
• It’s not nec­es­sary to beat myself up if I for­get stuff about a book.
• If I want to become a changed per­son, It’s impor­tant to read. Period.

Some­times, I get an idea and state it too strongly. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.